stas' weblog

In case if you’re an active user of torrent networks like me you may discover one day you have a lot of music stored as APE-compressed AudioCD disk images. Although nothing bad, it is rather hard to manage a big music collection stored like this and navigate between tracks while listening this music. Recently I decided to convert the entire collection to the separate FLAC-compressed tracks, and here’s how you can achive the same.

• Install audio/cuetools and audio/shntool packages (or whatever it called in your 3rd party software manager)
• Install audio/flac package (you’ll need metaflac to tag resulted files)

• Split the big APE file to separate FLAC-compressed tracks:

  cuebreakpoints my_favorite_music.cue  | \
      shnsplit -o flac my_favortite_music.ape
  

• Add metadata information to FLAC tracks:

  /usr/local/share/examples/cuetools/cuetag.sh \
      my_favorite_music.cue *.flac
  

• Rename resulted files (optional). I use the following script:

  #!/bin/csh
  set c=0
  foreach i (`echo *.flac`)
          set name=`metaflac --show-tag=TITLE $i | \
              sed -E -e 's,TITLE=,,' -e 's,[[:space:]]+,_,g'`
          set filename=`printf %.2d__%s ${c} ${name}`
          mv ${i} "${filename}".flac
          set c=`expr ${c} + 1`
  end
  

After that you’ll receive a number of properly named flac tracks in the working dir. Enjoy!